"The Australian": feeding national conservatism to Australia's power elites

National conservatism is the ideology that surrounds Trump. It is the faux intellectual dressing for MAGA.

The Australian made room for a feature article by Brit John O’Sullivan on the weekend of October 11-12. In it, he oozed nostalgia for a mythic Britain where forelock-tugging white yokels allowed the establishment to get on with creating Literature and Philosophy. He also introduced Australian “conservatives” to James Orr.

The title sounds benign: “The ‘vibe shift’ in middle England”. This set of activists is not benign: they code switch to suit an audience. They intend to radicalise those audiences, one step at a time.

Several facts that Australians need to know about John O’Sullivan include that he remains the international editor for Quadrant, Australia’s rightwing journal, and that he has a “law”. “O’Sullivan’s Law states that all organisations that are not explicitly right-wing will over time become left-wing” with the intent that this must be fought.(1)

O’Sullivan’s article is hinged around a Thatcher conference, expressing certainty that a deep love for Maggie Thatcher’s reforms remains core to a White British hinterland, while its cities are overrun with indiscriminate migration.

O’Sullivan uses Birmingham as a warning: white middle class pockets surrounded, in his depiction, by multicultural decay.

Naturally, O’Sullivan will never allow that his friend Thatcher and their think tanks were in so many ways the cause of Britain’s ills. Waves of “austerity” for the masses, contrasted with government welfare for the bankers, has eaten away at the infrastructure and morale of the country. Worse, lives are literally becoming shorter, as are the children.(2)

O’Sullivan has a vested interest in boosting Maggie Thatcher’s legacy. To protect her, he blames immigration and progressives for the problems he diagnoses. He depicts Labour working to paying nurses and teachers a living wage, after years of insulting conditions, as a feckless waste of money. The proposal to make the rich pay their share of tax is dismissed as ridiculously unworthy of consideration.

His friends in the networks fostered Brexit, causing an influx of non-White people to do the essential jobs that White Europeans could no longer fill, then capitalised on that fact.

O’Sullivan joined the “steering committee” of the neoliberal project, the Mont Pelerin Society, in 1971. He wrote, as Nafeez Ahmed, describes it “significant sections” of the Thatcher era Tory Party manifesto. He then served as PM Maggie Thatcher’s speechwriter and senior policy advisor. He is also one of her biographers.

Thatcher’s political dedication to the neoliberal project was fostered by Antony Fisher’s Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) and that body sponsored her co-founding of another “free market” think tank, the Centre for Social Policy (CSP). These are the core of what has been nicknamed Tufton Street, the UK division of the Atlas Network’s global operations (with interlinked non-partners).

In the US, the Heritage Foundation (longtime Atlas partner) was drawing up the first Mandate for Leadership (now Project 2025) setting out Ronald Reagan’s economic reforms. In 1980, Heritage funded the “Social Affairs Unit” out of the UK’s IEA. It was intended to push the IEA’s “extreme market ideas into the field of sociology.” (Ahmed) Much of its work was PR for the beleaguered tobacco industry, one of its major donors, but it was broadly content to act for any industry sector facing scrutiny. O’Sullivan was on its “Advisory Board”.

Antony Fisher was at that point working to coordinate international “free market” thinktanks into official rather than ad hoc cooperation as the “Atlas Economic Research Foundation”. Incorporated in 1981, it became the Atlas Network.(3)

O’Sullivan was Director of Studies at the Heritage Foundation from 1979-83. He edited that institution’s journal (founded by Neo Nazi Roger Pearson). O’Sullivan was a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. He has several other think tank affiliations not listed as Atlas partners. Under the auspices of neocon Atlas partner American Enterprise Institute, he founded the New Atlantic Initiative which was intended, amongst goals such as promoting free trade and neocon priorities, to lobby for Israel’s benefit in Europe.

O’Sullivan is described as a journalist as well as commentator. His contributions to the neoliberal and culturally reactionary project have come via his roles in the media, including Radio Free Europe. He took over editing the National Review from founder William F. Buckley.

From The Atlantic Partnership site

After 9/11, O’Sullivan became a dedicated anti-Muslim activist. Nafeez Ahmed depicts him as marketing “an early articulation of the ‘white genocide’ theory” that fear-mongers over immigration as an existential threat to White/Western existence.

In 2013, O’Sullivan founded the Hungary-based Danube Institute, where Western chauvinism and deeply reactionary social policy is fostered. Attacking Muslims is a central facet of Orbán’s think tank branch. Several Australian “statesmen” and media figures have become part of that branch.

In 2015-2016, John O’Sullivan was the editor of Australia’s rightwing journal, Quadrant, founded in 1956 with the support of the CIA to oppose the “communists” of Melbourne University and their Meanjin journal. (The CIA was disappointed in the years that followed at the leadership’s lack of subtlety in that anti-left work.) The current editor of Quadrant is active in the Hungarian networks.

In 2016, O’Sullivan was, according to the guest list, at the Conversazione at the Melbourne Club where the Orbán operation was introduced to Melbourne’s upper echelons. It was run by Claudio Véliz, then an emeritus professor at Melbourne’s Latrobe University and part of the Quadrant circle. The event largely worked as fear-mongering against Muslims, who had been displaced in large numbers by 2015, with many looking for safety in the West.

In the October 2025 article, O’Sullivan introduces “conservative” and moneyed Australia to James Orr as a “policy guru”, a “Cambridge [associate] professor of the philosophy of religion and the UK chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation (EBF) (the local parent body of the international ‘national conservatism’ movement).” None of those roles is likely to arouse red flags for Australian readers. Nor is this portrait of Orr as an elegant host of intellectual luncheons.

It is hard to imagine that urbane man describing migrants as “invaders” in vitriolic and distorting language to an Orbán-sphere event. One academic colleague has, however, described him as “more Tommy Robinson than St Thomas Aquinas”. (Tommy Robinson is a bigoted thug.)

O’Sullivan flags Orr’s role leading the “think” tank the Centre for a Better Britain (CFABB). Orr has recently left that deniable role at this body advising Reform, to become an official Reform advisor. Reform is the latest iteration of the parties founded by Nigel Farage to promote nativist sentiment in the UK. Ahmed documents Farage photographed with overt Neo Nazis in the 1990s and working with Steve Bannon to create a Tea Party (proto MAGA) political movement for the UK around 2012.

Reform has constant scandals over candidates with links to, and promotion of, thugs fostering racist violence, and antisemitism. Links to Russian money are amongst the issues.

Dark money expert Peter Geoghegan described Orr and CFABB as fostering Project 2025 for the UK. Orr holds a “hardline opposition to abortion in all circumstance.” His language against LGBTQIA people is also extreme.

The Edmund Burke Foundation appears to be a Peter Thiel-supported operation that has worked to turn the national conservative ideology into a conference movement. Thiele gave the keynote at the first NatCon conference. Orr was led in the EBF by Israeli Jewish Nationalist settler-extremists whose careers had been fostered by the Atlas Network. John O’Sullivan is one of the drafters of the National Conservatism Statement of Principles and Orr is a signatory. Catholic integralists (Francoist authoritarians) are also in that mix. Christopher DeMuth, longtime Atlas affiliate, was head of the EBF’s conference plan. Thiel’s first post-college job was fomenting culture wars with the support of an Atlas tank and donor.(5)

NatCon is largely a Christian Nationalist project, but works with Israeli Jewish Nationalists and Indian Hindutva nationalists to reinforce each other’s projects. They use faith identity as a placeholder for “race”. It is a broadly bigoted movement against anything not characterised as “traditional” as well as pro fossil fuel, anti climate action.

Orr has also been on the board of the Prosperity Institute. That front group used to be the Legatum Institute and was one of two founding shareholders in the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC). Orr is an ARC Advisory Board member with two Australian past prime ministers, one deputy prime minister and two politicians who picture themselves as future prime ministers. The Australian appears to have made itself a conduit of that body’s conference papers. Greg Sheridan, foreign editor for the masthead, spoke at the 2016 Melbourne Club event and has become part of the Orbán scene. He spoke at ARC 2025.

Orr appears to be one of the key linking figures between NatCon and ARC. With his work at the Trinity Forum Europe, he was associated, as tracked by Nafeez Ahmed, with Thiel operations promoting “race” “science” and Western chauvinism. Orr hosted eugenicist Charles Murray, described as the academic KKK, at Cambridge in 2021. Murray’s career was a product of Atlas Network think tanks’ and donors’ activity.

Another operation emerging from that Thiel work at Cambridge is the Free Speech Union, which exists to promote the ability to claim that the ranking of “race” is scientific. It also functions as a broad spectrum warrior against “woke” speech and in support of rightwing talking points. Orr is on the initial body’s Advisory Council. There are Australian and a New Zealand/Aotearoa branches.

Orr is, furthermore noted as Faculty at the Common Sense Society, where Islamophobe and ARC board member Douglas Murray is on the “council of trustees”.

Orr is described as JD Vance’s “philosopher king” and a “polished extremist.”

This essay by Iain Overton describes how Orr’s philosophical ideas meld with his policy work.

The descent of the US into fascism is obvious. It is clearly a minoritarian enterprise, imposed on the majority.

It doesn’t matter that most people do not agree with O’Sullivan and Orr for their machinations to replicate such a regime in the UK using Reform.

Australians need to help dozing “conservative” power players see what they are being fed.

(1) The usage of O’Sullivan’s Law cited there is from Rebecca Weisser at Quadrant. It is entertaining that she depicts Quadrant as an exception to his rule, apparently not classing it as Right. Another use of the Law comes from DonorsTrust, the pass through organisation through which the dark money donors filter many of their donations to Atlas Network partners and also into the white supremacist sphere.

(2) That is certainly in large part because of the pandemic, but the pandemic was as deadly as it was in the UK because of bad management. The toll on nurses, for example, was unconscionable. The fact that the life expectancy is shorter in the north, however, contradicts that this is all attributable to the pandemic. Poverty in the north is much more severe. Pandemic deaths were worst in London. Accompany this with the fact that children in the UK are now experiencing rickets, scurvy and nutritional deficiencies, as well as being literally shorter than earlier generations and than their European peers, and it becomes clear that the larger story of austerity is written in the bodies of the masses.(4)

(3) John Blundell, who had been a member of the MPS since 1990, honouring a career filled with Atlas Network partner activity collated this collection of essays documenting the operations of the network in 2001, published by the IEA.

(4) I am happy to make the guest list available to researchers. Many were there who did not support the existential-threat from Islam line. Some Liberal party affiliates actively opposed the rhetoric, as did others. Hugh Morgan is also listed on that guest list. He has been a key figure in the promotion of the “think” tank movement in Australia.

(5) O’Sullivan treats Farage as a normal political option in his article. He introduces readers to Thomas Skinner, an oafish rightwing influencer. He also name-checks Thiel, offering him a small rightwing business to support, as well as deploying the tech bros’ favourite Tolkien allusion.